Perceptive readers of my November 2017 blog will have noted that, while I confidently outlined the political climate in the UK in 1940, in the months after Kritvitsky’s revelations, I was more circumspect about the conditions in the USA, and why his warnings were ignored there. Had a band of moles been inserted deeply and clandestinely into US institutions, in similar fashion to the how the careers of the Cambridge spies were prompted? Was the F.B.I., the equivalent of MI5, trained to be on the alert against Communist subversion? Did the two counter-espionage services collaborate? Why was Krivitsky’s evidence to the Dies Committee, in an open forum (unlike the clandestine way Krivitsky provided testimony to British intelligence) not taken seriously? Were there links between the Soviet spies in the UK and the Americas? In summary, were the patterns of denial the same? Above all, I needed to understand better why the evidence provided in September 1939 by the Soviet courier Whittaker Chambers (who had broken off contact with the NKVD in 1938) had been ignored by J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I., and by President Roosevelt. This was apparently a far more scandalous act of negligence than that which occurred in the UK. What was going on?
I realised that I needed to dig around a lot more. I had many years ago read Chambers’s memoir Witness (1952), and more recently some of the major works on Soviet espionage (Dallin’s Soviet Espionage (1955), Lamphere’s The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story (1986), Andrew’s and Gordievsky’s KGB: The Inside Story (1990), Weinberg’s and Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood (1999), Haynes’ and Klehr’s In Denial (2003), and Haynes’, Klehr’s and Vassiliev’s Spies (2009)) without taking careful notes of the history of the KGB and GRU in America. A review of them has since reminded me that the state of play in the US was different from that in the UK in at least four significant ways: 1) The USA did not officially recognise the Soviet government until Roosevelt’s administration took the plunge in October 1933, which meant that the Soviet Union had no diplomatic presence in the US to mastermind operations, or to provide a channel for sending information back to Moscow; 2) The Soviet Union was slow to conclude that the USA was going to be a far more important country to track closely, with its influence on global affairs overtaking that of the British Empire, and its technological developments providing a rich lode of secrets to be stolen; 3) Since the New Deal was philosophically very sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s totalitarian instincts, the US government was in fact recruiting intellectuals and professionals with seriously leftist opinions and instincts, which meant that the problem of infection of the corridors of power via subterfuge was no longer necessary; and 4) While Soviet spies and couriers were able to cross between Europe and North America with impunity, there was an almost complete absence of exchange of intelligence about them between the different security services. Yet none of these books analyses in depth the ideological background of the dozens of officials who ended up spying for the Soviet Union, or why they considered that such treacherous behavior was necessary. I continue my search.
To start with, I have been boning up on other aspects of the transatlantic connections. I referred in my November blog to the cultural denial in the US over Soviet infiltration, and the threat it represented. While on holiday in California and Maui in December, I read M. Stanton Evans’s Blacklisted by History (The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies) (2007), and the memoir by one of the spies unmasked by Igor Gouzenko’s revelations in Canada in 1945, Gordon Lunan’s Redhanded (Inside the spy ring that changed the world) (2005). Lunan was a Scotsman who emigrated to Canada in 1938, and spent five years in prison for his role as a courier between some of the atom spies. He died in 2005. I have also read, this month, Lewis E. Lehrman’s Churchill, Roosevelt & Company (2017), which has an illuminating chapter on Harry Dexter White, the U.S. Treasury official who collaborated with John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, and who was a Soviet spy.
Re-examining the McCarthy hearings is critical because a) they have suffered from a host of leftist distortion in the decades since, and b) their proceedings reveal a mine of information about the allegiances of dozens of US government officials around the war years. The name of Senator Joe McCarthy is almost always linked to the notions of ‘witch-hunt’ and ‘hysteria’ in today’s press. For example, on one page of Gordon Corera’s recent book Cyberspies appear the following two statements: “Venona’s revelations helped fuel the McCarthy era of witch-hunts in Washington amid fears that the Soviets had reached deep into the establishment”, and “That [Philby tipping off Maclean & Burgess] intensified the spy hysteria sweeping Britain and America.” Comparisons are also fluidly made between McCarthyism and the Trump administration. In a letter published in the December 22/29 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, the irrepressible Edward Horowitz wrote: “The paranoid style in American politics embodied by the late senator [McCarthy] and his followers seems to have been ominously resurrected in 2016”, while in the London Review of Books of January 4, Gordon Lears, in an otherwise very level-headed piece, wrote: “In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, although it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria in the early 1950s.”
But wait! ‘Witch-hunts’? Whereas there is no such entity as ‘witches’, and thus hunts for them are bound to be abortive, Communist spies were a very real menace in the 1930 and 1940s, and for a long time after. To classify attempts to root out such subversives as ‘witch-hunts’, at a time when Stalin had been engaging in the most monstrous show-trials (or sentences without trial) of the century, resulting in the deaths of millions of innocents, displays an incredible degree of hypocrisy. And to classify as ‘paranoia’ or ‘hysteria’ the energies of those trying to defend the nation against such infection reflects an enormous naivety about the nature of the threat. Do such people not realise that it was Stalin’s plan to strengthen his country after the war before taking on the inevitable showdown with ‘the imperialists’? Did they really want to transform the USA into a totalitarian prison-camp on the lines of Stalin’s Russia? What is more, McCarthy’s role is frequently distorted. It is often overlooked that the better publicized investigations were undertaken by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), i.e. not by the Senate, to which McCarthy belonged.
The lore of McCarthyism focusses on attempts to deprive writers and actors (darlings in the public eye) of their right to a living, but, in reality, the thrust of the Senate hearings was very much on political infiltration, particularly in the State Department and the Army. Stanton Evans performs a very thorough job in explaining how the well-researched inquiries by McCarthy and his team were constantly stalled and deflected by career officials, primarily in the State Department. It was not considered a disqualification for a diplomat or civil servant to be (or have been) a communist, and McCarthy was instead attacked as the subversive. As Evans writes: “Throughout, the White House, Department of Justice, and other agencies of the Truman government showed far more interest in tracking down McCarthy’s sources than in uncovering alleged Soviet agents or Communist Party members, or in addressing the lax security standards deplored by the LRB [Labor Relations Board]. In the view of the Truman administration, the problem with Joe McCarthy was not that he didn’t have inside sources of loyalty data but that he all too obviously did. Which was from a national security standpoint beneficial, as information on such cases was sorely needed.”
Yet there were dozens of Soviet sympathizers in Roosevelt’s administration, many of whom engaged in real espionage. And this is where Evans misses an opportunity. Oddly, in his text he never mentions Walter Krivitsky (who was intensely interrogated by the Dies committee in 1939, and was a friend of Whittaker Chambers). Surely the highly public episode of Krivitsky’s denunciation of Stalin and his techniques merited some examination? Stanton provides some analysis of what happened before 1941, but fails to explain how all these persons had been hired, or whether there was a deep plot by Moscow to recruit early at academic institutions (along the lines of the Cambridge-Oxford strategy). He provides no thorough analysis of the different strains of socialist, from the democratic New Dealer, through the committed totalitarian and the dedicated Communist, to the Stalinist devotee and actual spy for the Soviet Union. He fails to explore the question of whether subterfuge was actually necessary – unlike in Britain, where Philby, Burgess and Maclean at least had to go through some display of ideological realignment before being recruited by the various government services.
The problem was that, from Roosevelt’s own leadership, the proliferation of government officials with open sympathies for Stalin’s Soviet Union was not something to be regretted. It had been going on for some time, and had been tolerated. This became clear in 1939. The pattern of subversion had started with Whittaker Chambers, who, when he became the leading courier for Soviet intelligence in 1932, was instructed to cut all his ties with the Communist Party. But it was Chambers himself who, shocked by the Moscow show-trials, and the persecution and murder of agents in situations like his, decided to cut himself loose, defy an order to travel to Moscow, and then go into hiding – all before the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact provoked tremors in such persons – and then confess all in 1939. In September, he was convinced by Isaac Don Levine (the same man who befriended Krivitsky, and ghost-wrote for him) to speak to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle. At this meeting, Chambers named eighteen contacts in influential positions in government. Berle informed the White House, but Roosevelt did nothing: Chambers was not interviewed by the FBI until 1942.
As Andrew and Gordievsky write: “Roosevelt was not interested. He seems simply to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd. Equally remarkably, Berle simply pigeonholed his own report. He made no charges about Hiss until 1941, when he mentioned Chambers’s charges to Hiss’s former employer, Supreme Court Justice Feliks Frankfurter, and to the diplomat Dean Acheson. Both dismissed them out of hand. Berle took no further action; he did not send a report of his interview with Chambers to the FBI until the bureau requested it in 1943. Among others who brought Chambers’s story to Roosevelt’s attention were Ambassador William Bullitt, labor leader David Dubinsky, and journalist Walter Winchell. Once again, the president brushed the charges aside.”
And when Krivitsky provided his testimony to the Dies Committee, Roosevelt was equally defiant. In November 1940, as Gary Kern reports, Roosevelt replied to him: “I do not agree with you. I do not regard the Communists as any present or future threat to our country. In fact, I look upon Russia as our strongest ally in the years to come. As I told you when you began your investigation, you should confine yourself to Nazis and Fascists. While I do not believe in Communism, Russia is far better off and the world is safer with Russia under Communism than under the tsars. Stalin is a great leader, and although I deplore some of his methods, it is the only way he can safeguard his government
This is quite an extraordinary statement of political philosophy. Expressing a conviction that the Soviet Union might become an ally (implicitly against the Nazis: the US was not yet at war) was one thing. After all, Churchill was issuing similar messages. And, in the summer of 1940 in Britain, the campaign against a ‘Fifth Column’ likewise included Communists (and pacifists) among its targets – an initiative which, because of Guy Burgess’s moves, would likewise be restricted to ‘Nazis and Fascists’. But Roosevelt went further: he denied that communism was a threat to the country, and effectively gave his seal of approval to Stalin’s dictatorship. The millions who had been slaughtered under Stalin’s despotism had no say in the debate whether the country was ‘better off’, and to suggest that the only alternative to Stalinism was a perpetuation of Romanov tsarism reflects a monumental naivety. The fact that Roosevelt considered that Stalin’s government deserved to be safeguarded implies that the American president believed that the victims of Stalin’s purges were all guilty of attempting to undermine him, presumably as part of the rings of ‘capitalist encirclement’. Or else he was woefully ill-informed about the dictator’s regime. In any case, the conceptual similarities between New Dealerism and totalitarian control could not be more clear.
Another explanation might be that it was Roosevelt’s intellectual flabbiness – his vanity, his deviousness, his manipulativeness, all features accepted by his biographers – that led him to make such statements. He was notorious for sending contradictory messages to his subordinates, and for refusing to have any commandment confirmed in writing, as he implicitly did not believe in any kind of ‘cabinet’ decision-making, and wanted to reserve for himself the flexibility to change his mind at will, often bypassing his immediate ministers and ambassadors. This behavior was all part of his assumption that his role was to cooperate with Stalin on a higher plane, and thus ensure the safety of the world. Whichever case is true, it shows an example of unbridled hubris, and contempt for the democratic process. If he had seriously felt that certain state secrets should be passed to Stalin, he could have arranged for such communications (as did Churchill, with the massaged Ultra messages). Yet, instead, he condoned a furtive and uncontrolled process of leakage. Such behavior was irresponsibly ingenuous, and arguably treasonous.
What is more, a real Soviet agent had confessed to the security authorities, and named spies in Roosevelt’s administration. There was no exact equivalent in the United Kingdom of 1940, since no native Briton with a communist background had been recruited solely as a courier. The Cambridge group were indeed all spies. The closest analogue is perhaps Goronwy Rees, who was recruited as a spy, but had a Damascene conversion (or, if not a real conversion, a shocking revelation that the cause was unjust) after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact. If he had gone to the authorities then, and named names, there must have been a possibility that his testimony would have been taken seriously: that is why Guy Burgess wanted him killed. Yet Chambers identified such persons as Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie – and Roosevelt did not care. (Chambers wrote that FDR laughed out loud when informed of what was going on.) If Churchill had been offered significant evidence that equivalent figures (say John Maynard Keynes, Alexander Cadogan, and Orme Sargent) had been providing confidential material to the Soviet Union, they would have been purged (UK-style) immediately, and a wholesale cleansing of the stables would have occurred. And how close Krivitsky came! It is my belief – and that of others – that Krivitsky knew more than he was prepared to divulge when he was interrogated in January 1940, but the incompetence of MI5 and SIS on that occasion was dwarfed by the nonchalance of Roosevelt.
So what had been happening with US governmental institutions? Initial study gives the impression that no deep subversion in American universities had been taking place (although Harvard does feature prominently in the resumés of the offenders). Yet there were links with the Soviet espionage structure in Britain, which had been developed several years earlier. The curricula vitae of some of the agents bespeak much, hinting at hitherto unexplored relationships. In alphabetical order, here are some details of those spies (most of whom were revealed by Whittaker Chambers), many identifiable in the Venona transcripts, who had transatlantic links (with cryptonyms in parentheses):
Solomon Adler [SACHS or SAX]: Adler was born in Leeds in 1909, and studied at New College, Oxford (1927-1930), where he took a first, and then a master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics. He moved to the USA in 1935 to perform research, and at some stage joined the Treasury Department. He became a US citizen in 1940, and was posted to China, from where he advised Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Identified by Chambers in 1939, he was a subject of a loyalty test in 1949, after which he returned to the UK to teach at Cambridge. He then moved back to China, and died in 1994.
Cedric Belfrage [CHARLIE]: Belfrage was born in 1904, and attended Gresham’s School, Holt, the same institution that educated W. H. Auden, Donald Maclean, Bernard and Peter Floud, James Klugmann, Brian Simon and Tom Wintringham. He reportedly went to Cambridge University (college unknown), leaving soon thereafter, in 1927, for Hollywood. He joined the Communist Party in 1937, and was recruited by British Security Coordination with responsibility for the Western hemisphere in December 1941. Identified by Chambers in 1939, his spying came to an end when he was inadvertently compromised by Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA in 1943. Nevertheless, at the end of the war, he obtained a post with the military government in Germany (like Jürgen Kuczynski). He appeared before the HUAC in 1953, and was deported back to England in 1955, as he had never taken up US citizenship. He then wrote some sophistical and self-serving volumes of autobigraphy.
Lauchlin Currie [PAGE]: Currie was a Canadian citizen, born in Nova Scotia in 1902, who was educated at the London School of Economics. He moved to Harvard for a doctorate in economics, became an American citizen in 1943, and was hired by Harry White at the Treasury. After a spell at the Federal Reserve Board, he joined the White House staff as an administrative assistant to Roosevelt in 1939. Two years later he was sent to China, and fulfilled other missions for FDR. He became deputy administrator of the Foreign Economic Administration in 1943, but resigned after the death of Roosevelt. Chambers had identified him as at least a ‘fellow-traveller’ in 1939: Venona confirmed his role, and Currie escaped to Colombia in 1950. He was stripped of his US citizenship in 195
George Eltenton [DORIN]: Eltenton was British, a communist sympathiser, and a physicist who at some stage studied at the Cavendish Laboratory. He visited the USSR in 1931 under the auspices of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR and from 1933 to 1938 worked at the Institute of Chemical Physics in Leningrad. In 1942 while working in the USA he made indirect contact with Robert Oppenheimer with a request for information for the USSR about atom bomb technology. He approached the noted nuclear physicist through Haakon Chevalier. He was picked up in June 1946 by the FBI, and admitted trying to obtain documents on behalf of the Soviet consulate. He moved back to Britain in 1947. His wife Ada was an even more ardent communist than George, and worked at the nest of fellow-travellers and spies that was the Institute for Pacific Relations.
Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley [GIRL FRIEND]: Fairfax-Cholmeley was the daughter of British missionaries in China, also a communist. At some stage, she became the second wife of Israel Epstein [MINAYEV], born in Warsaw, another Soviet spy, recruited in China in 1937. In a 1942 report, it was stated that she managed to escape from Hong Kong. She and her husband apparently visited Britain in 1944, but were able to reach the USA that year, where Fairfax-Cholmeley worked for the Institute of Pacific Relations alongside Anthony Jenkinson, or/and for United China Relief. Probably in 1951, the Epsteins left to return to China. Elsie died in 1984.
Michael Greenberg [YANK]: Greenberg was British, born in 1914, and attended Manchester Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was described as “the sort of fellow one could take to lunch at the Pitt Club” by Sir John Colville. A Chinese scholar, he was an effective Communist proselytizer as he knew how to put on social graces. He claimed that, in the City of London most people shared the Marxist analysis of capitalism that he had learned in Cambridge in the 1930s, but that they were, by contrast, quite content with the implicit inequalities. He was a friend of Michael Straight, and won a scholarship to Harvard in 1939. Roland Perry states that he had by then been recruited by KGB. He became editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations. In 1942, Greenberg was appointed China specialist for Board of Economic Warfare, within Foreign Economic Administration. He was given the cryptonym ‘YANK’, as he had by then gained US citizenship. He resigned in 1946 after Bentley’s defection, and was questioned by the FBI in 1947. He did not admit to passing on information, returned to the UK, but was denied both US & GB citizenship. He died in 1992.
Anthony Jenkinson: Little is known about this Briton, except that he was a member of the Institute of Pacific Relations, working alongside Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley. His name was mentioned alongside that of Fairfax-Cholmeley and Michael Greenberg in the Us Senate Sub-Committee report on the Institute for Pacific Relations.
Herbert Norman: Norman was a Canadian whom Chambers described as ‘an alumnus of the Cambridge circle’, alongside Greenberg and Straight. He was born in Japan, to missionary parents, in 1909, and, having taken his graduate degree in history at the University of Toronto, studied at Trinity College from 1933-1936, under the tutelage of John Cornford. Amy Knight (in How The Cold War Began) presents evidence that he joined the Communist Party in 1934. He entered the graduate program at Harvard in 1936, to study Japanese history. Stanton describes him as ‘a Cambridge grad who specialized in far East Affairs and would rise to a high-ranking job in Canada’s diplomatic service.’ He was also closely involved with the Institute of Pacific Relations. After suspicions of his having been a communist spy were voiced in the 1950s, he committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the Swedish Embassy in Cairo, in 1957 – a method of departure from this life experienced by several Soviet spies.
Michael Straight [NIGEL]: Straight was born in the US in 1916, but moved, after his mother’s remarriage, to Dartington Hall. He studied at the London School of Economics in 1933, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he joined a Communist cell, and the Apostles. He became Secretary and President-elect of the Cambridge Union. Straight was recruited by the GRU in 1937 by Anthony Blunt, who passed on orders that he should return to the USA to gain information on the US banking industry. He spied in the USA, but confessed to his deeds when about to be re-hired by the US government in 1963, in the process naming Blunt and Leo Long. He was a close friend of Roosevelt, and a speechwriter for the president. He claimed that Rothschild’s wife was in love with him (Blunt encouraged him to have an affair, according to Roland Perry); he married Belinda Compton, sister of Catherine Walston, who was to become Graham Greene’s lover. Guy Burgess tipped him off about Krivitsky during the former’s abortive trip to Moscow with Isaiah Berlin in the summer of 1940. Thereafter Straight moved to the State Department to watch Krivitsky’s movements, leading to the latter’s assassination. Straight died in 2004.
Julian Wadleigh [104TH]: Wadleigh was born in the US in Greenfield, Mass. in 1904, but moved as a child to the UK, where he attended Furzie School in New Milton, and then Marlborough College. He took his undergraduate degree at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Greats from 1922 to 1925. His father, a clergyman, was based in Switzerland, c/o Haskard & Co. in Florence. He was known as the ‘bolshie American’ at Oxford, which indicates that his left-wing views were well-developed at that stage. He was awarded a second-class degree at Oxford, and subsequently enrolled at the London School of Economics, where he met his wife. He moved to the US for a fellowship at the University of Chicago, and then joined the Department of Agriculture in 1932. (His wife left him for a Canadian economist, but returned in 1936). Wadleigh then joined the Trade Agreements Division of the State Department in 1936, soon meeting Eleanor Nelson, a leftist, who put him in touch with communists in Washington. He was introduced to an intermediary named ‘Harold Wilson’ and then to Whittaker Chambers. Wadleigh was aware of Stalin’s purges and the murder of Ignace Reiss, but still went to Turkey in 1938. When he came back, Chambers told him he was defecting. He and his wife divorced, but both remarried (his wife marrying Carroll Daugherty, who was also named by Chambers), after which Wadleigh went to Italy and stayed with his brother Dickie, an intelligence officer. Even though his identity was revealed by Chambers, Wadleigh was able to write articles in the New York Post in July 1949 explaining why he spied for the Communists, and did not lose his job. He died in 1994.
I believe this list alone provides some great opportunities for further research. It includes the careers of Britons who seem to have avoided the radar-screen of espionage history writing up until now. It is hard to find firm evidence of the educational careers of these spies as they studied in the UK, yet it must exist somewhere. The pattern hints at extended rings of subversives – not only at the known hive of evil-doing at Cambridge University, but also at networks at Oxford and the London School of Economics. (How many familiar with the inextinguishable ‘Cambridge Five’ would not recognise the names of Leo Long and of Michael Straight, let alone those of Michael Greenberg and Herbert Norman?) It suggests extended efforts by the NKVD/KGB and GRU to export some of the expertise it had developed in Britain to the United States. And it all reflects some extraordinary light on the reactions of the respective governments of the two countries to the discovery of reputed Soviet espionage in their midst. Did they communicate at all, as these dubious persons crossed the Atlantic Ocean? Apparently not, since many in the United States maintained an intense dislike for Britain as a former colonial oppressor. Yet the National Archives are gradually revealing more about some of these goings-on. For example, in 2006, files on George Eltenton were declassified, and scope for further integrative research presents itself.
Lastly, there is the Canadian connection. In September 1945, the Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in Ottawa, taking over a hundred documents with him. These files identified a ring of Communists, or communist sympathisers, who had been handing over secret material to the Soviet Union. The response of the Canadian government was markedly different from that of the USA or the UK. In the USA, where a large amount of support, even collusion, over the betrayal of confidential information was evident, and the process was delegated to the Senate to hear testimony from witnesses, the latter were able to invoke the Fifth Amendment in order not to incriminate themselves. In the UK, where the identification of spies was largely reliant on information gained from counter-espionage means (such as the Venona transcripts), the authorities were strongly opposed to revealing to the Russians that they had decrypted their secret messages, and thus were dependent on gaining confessions from suspects before any trial could be conducted. That was the case with Klaus Fuchs, as it was indeed also with Alan Nunn May, who was spirited to England, and confessed, as a result of the Gouzenko revelations. May was arrested on March 5, 1946, the same day that Churchill gave his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri.
The Canadian government, on the other hand, exploited wartime conditions to set up a Commission to investigate the evidence and interview the persons identified. Named the Kelloch-Taschereau Commission, it was set up on February 13, 1946, when it began hearing Gouzenko’s testimony. Two days later, the suspects were arrested, and were required to give their evidence, in a fashion that bypassed many of their traditional rights. Yet, as a mechanism for showing the world the deep subversive activities of Soviet espionage, it was a very successful exercise. The commission issued an interim report on March 4, 1946, and its final version (which can be inspected in full at http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/472640/publication.html ) in July of that year. The trials of the suspects took place between March 1946 and March 1947: Gordon Lunan, who was considered one of the most important, had acted as a go-between for GRU colonel Rogov and three others accused, namely Edward Mazerall, Durnford Smith, and Israel Halperin. (It was Halperin’s address-book that led to Klaus Fuchs, and Herbert Norman was likewise unmasked by this object.) Under pressure, and fearing a possible death penalty, Lunan confessed in February 1946, and agreed to cooperate.
The definitive book on the Gouzenko affair is Amy Knight’s How The Cold War Began (2005). Yet I believe this work suffers from a common malaise in academic history of this genre: it suggests that the Cold War was caused by a mistrust of Stalin by the West, and that the ‘hunt for Soviet spies’ (as the phrase appears in the subtitle of Knight’s book) was somehow misguided. But there was no hunt. The names came out in broad daylight, and the intentions of Soviet intelligence were clear: to steal secrets from the West. In the USA, the identification of spies by Chambers had been ignored. Moreover, most governmental authorities had determined well before September 1945 that Stalin had misled the Allies at Yalta, and was not to be trusted. The roots of that breakdown went back to Warsaw in 1944, with Stalin’s cowardly refusal to assist in the uprising. Yet the follow-up was anaemic. Knight writes, without a trace of irony: “In chronicling Gouzenko’s story, this book renews a debate that began in the McCarthy era and divides historians to this day. To what extent were the people accused of passing secrets to the Soviets during the 1940s really spies, and to what extent were they merely individuals sympathetic to the communist cause and unwittingly drawn into the Soviet espionage network?” As if that distinction has any substance or merit: they were spies, and they knew it. For example, Fred Rose, one of her primary subjects, went into hiding when the CP was banned, and then approached the GRU in 1942: Knight reports that. Her implicit sympathy for communist ‘ideals’ pervades her work, and she shows all the conventional disdain for McCarthy and his operations (‘the frenzy of the espionage scare’).
Gordon Lunan originally published his memoir as The Making of A Spy. In 2005, it was re-issued, and updated, as Redhanded: Inside the Spy Ring that Changed the World. The title reflects the fact that Lunan admits his role as a spy: indeed the work is lacking in self-pity, and gives the impression that, for all the injustices of the process, and the way he was interrogated, his sentence of five years in the penitentiary was deserved. Moreover, it is a touching and well-written account of growing up in England in the 1920s and 1930s, a world that will be recognized by those who have read, say, George Orwell’s memoirs and fictionalized accounts of those times. Lunan was born in Kirkcaldy in Scotland in 1914: his family moved to Leeds when he was four years old. He was educated at Mill Hill School (although that institution’s website does not appear to be aware of his existence), after which he drifted into leftist circles, although he claims he never joined the communist party. He explains his decision to move suddenly to Canada in 1938 as in impulsive one made in order to ‘see the world’, and he quickly associated himself with ‘anti-fascist’ causes when he arrived there. He nevertheless managed to be recruited by the Wartime Information Board in 1943, where he was approached by Rogov of Soviet military intelligence. He provides some strong insights into government corruption, and is forthright in describing how the war commission undermined individual rights. He also offers a ruthless exposé of prison conditions, yet never suggests that his punishment was unearned. Lunan died soon after the book was published.
Yet there is humbuggery in Lunan’s account, as well. The account of his emigration is very dubious: he describes watching a May Day parade in London in 1938, where protests against the government’s inaction in Spain were being made. It was then, he writes ‘that I finally decided that war would surely come and that I had better see more of the world before the sword of Damocles dropped’. But escaping from the world of advertising in London to a similar milieu in Canada was hardly ‘seeing the world’. Is it possible he was despatched there by the CPGB, or by Soviet controllers? Installed in Canada, he was easily taken in by the hypocrisy expressed by the Nazi-Soviet pact, which was hardly the reaction of someone only on the fringes of the Communist Party. He sounds much more like a hard-line Stalinist: he completely ignores the monstrosities of Stalin’s prison-camp. His final appeal in the book shows all the self-serving cant of the communist apologist: “We must use the democratic rights we still have – to vote, to speak up in our communities, to write letters to the press and to the politicians – to show that we count. But to do so, we must first arm ourselves with a knowledge of our own history and the ability to take a critical look at world events, at history in the making.” Well, of course, comrade. Do exactly that. But nobody had those rights in the communist paradise, did they? There is a mountain of self-delusion in such statements. Yet it is a familiar refrain: ‘we thought we were helping Stalin, who was an ally in war, and were told that our governments were not doing enough to help him’. One can read this sad message again and again: last year Hamish MacGibbon trotted out the same explanation in Maverick Spy, the book about his spy father, James.
The reaction to the Gouzenko revelations shed a lot of light on the attitudes of the respective governments. Moscow Centre – promptly alerted by Kim Philby as to what was going on – was appalled, and after initial protests, by July 1946 had brought back home all its diplomats suspected of spying. The Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, was typically spineless: he initially wanted Gouzenko to return to the Embassy. He declared to the House of Commons that what he felt most important was ‘to see that nothing should be done which would cause the Russian Embassy to believe that Canada had the least suspicion of anything which was taking place there.’ No ‘hunt for spies’ in Ottawa, but abject appeasement. Mackenzie then travelled to Washington and London and had to be dissuaded from continuing to Moscow, since he was confident that the Soviet leader ‘would never have countenanced such activities’. The American press generally expressed naivety about what was going on, with Time and the New York Herald Tribune even condoning the espionage. One might have imagined that the British and American governments might have wondered whether, if a relative backwater like Ottawa was so riddled with Soviet spies, perhaps Washington and London might be similarly infected. Gouzenko, after all, had identified Nunn May, and given broad hints to the identity of Alger Hiss. But the USA was beset by indolence and nonchalance, and, in the United Kingdom, MI5 had by this time similarly transformed itself into an institution that condoned communism (as my book Misdefending the Realm explains). Thus, apart from a robust stance by Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, the British administration was suffused with the hope that the whole shooting-match was vastly overblown, and by the desire to keep matters firmly undercover. It was only when the courier Elizabeth Bentley revealed to the FBI all that she knew, on November 2, 1945, that the authorities started to become alive again, reinforced by the fact that decrypts from the Venona programme (though concealed from the public) started coming off the production line in 1946.
In summary, the common assessment of the Gouzenko affair is one of surprise and shock. The reaction of the Western Allies has been characterised as one of surprise, because they had no inkling of what was happening, and of shock, because Stalin was supposed to be an ally with whom they were ‘cooperating’. The negative attitude of Stalin had been ascribed to the fact that he was insulted when he discovered that the USA and Britain were sharing atomic secrets behind his back. But the democracies had had ample warning, from Chambers and Krivitsky, of what Stalin was up to, while Stalin had no misconceptions about the long-term adversarial relationship. He had had hundreds of spies working for over a decade, pillaging Western technology and secrets: he would not have expected anything less. As for Knight’s thesis that the Gouzenko affair signalled the beginning of the Cold War, enlightened opinion seems to have forgotten even this incident. The London Review of Books of January 25 carries a review of Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A World History, under the headline ‘Who started it?’ Yet the index to Westad’s book contains no entry for Gouzenko, or even for Soviet espionage. Has a new generation of historians overlooked what went on?
If the democracies had developed mechanisms for sharing intelligence in the 1930s, I suspect a more robust counter to Stalin’s espionage might have been effected. And I believe that a lot remains to be uncovered in the relationships between the activities of the spies in the UK, the USA, and Canada, and how the authorities acted – or failed to react – in response. The lack of intelligence-sharing between the UK and the USA existed for reasons of territoriality, traditional mistrust, and political inclination. The most notorious lapse was probably the role of Kitty Harris, sometime wife of Earl Browder, the head of the CPUSA, as Donald Maclean’s courier and lover. But there were clearly other incidents. The renowned distaste for communism by the head of the F.B.I., Edgar J. Hoover, had been long muted – a phenomenon that merits further study. And I shall continue to look out for an explanation of the intellectual and academic relationships – especially as Harvard is concerned. In a future blog entry, I also plan to disclose the curious relationship between Alexander Foote and the testimony of one of the witnesses before the Canadian commission. Anyone with any insights or sources that can contribute to this debate, or who can shed more light on the more obscure of the characters listed, is encouraged to contact me at antonypercy@aol.com.
P.S. Shortly before he died, in 2014, Chapman Pincher advised me to study his new edition of Treachery, which included a number of new items of research, some based on Russian archives. I at last acquired the 2012 edition (‘Updated and Uncensored Version’), and have started reading it. Yet it is difficult to detect what is new unless one performs an exact comparison with the first edition. Indeed, I have found some useful fresh nuggets and insights, but the work is still flawed because of its relentless a priori argument that Roger Hollis was the GRU spy ELLI. It is impossible to conceive that such an insignificant and incompetent officer could have masterminded the whole Sonia deception, and hoodwinked his colleagues and superiors about what was going on. I continue to believe that Pincher was fed a bundle of false clues in order that he would be distracted from the main quarry. More to be reported later.
January Commonplace entries appear here.